THE WOODLANDS, Texas—The 2022 SPE Hydraulic Fracturing Technical Conference kicked off Feb. 1 in the greater Houston area. The annual event returned to in-person attendance after being held as an online-only event last year. 

This year’s conference started with an opening plenary session featuring John McClennan, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Utah; John Dabbar, managing director low carbon technology at ConocoPhillips; and Michael Segura, senior vice president, completions and production and Halliburton. 

The opening discussion was moderated by Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Oilfield Services, who initiated the session with his thoughts on the role of unconventional resource development amid the energy transition.

“We’ve had some meaningful changes [in energy production], and the shale revolution is by far the most dramatic in my lifetime in my career,” he said. “By far the biggest change in the global energy system in my lifetime is the arrival of the shale revolution.”

Wright explained that while renewable resources such as solar and wind energy will play increasingly important roles in the energy transition, fossil fuels will continue to be a primary source of energy, particularly as the role of natural gas increases, displacing coal as a source of electricity. 

“Think of the energy prices we’ve had just in the last six months,” he said. “For us, it’s a curiosity, but if you live in Europe, it is more than a curiosity. There is this enormous explosion in home heating prices. Wealthy Sweden is subsidizing heating to try to keep the public anger down. Factories have shut down, jobs have been lost, fertilizer plants across the world have been shut down and are driving an incredibly rapid rise in the price of food. You drive up the price of fertilizer, you make poor people poorer.”

Meanwhile, McLennan provided an update on geothermal production, or enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, the EGS concept is to extract heat from a well to create a subsurface fracture system to which water can be added through injection wells.

McLennan explained that the EGS concept was introduced more than 50 years ago, and while early efforts were technically successful, they were not commercially successful. But the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has recently re-ignited interest in the technology.

“Five or six years ago the DOE said, ‘Let’s try and revitalize these technologies and recognize that we’ve got some things that we can get from the oil patch that are going to help,’” he said. “Because when those original [geothermal] wells were drilled, they were all just slightly inclined holes. And now with horizontal technologies and transverse fractures that exist off of these wells, there’s a potential that we can apply oil field technologies.”

McLennan is one of the leads on a program by the school’s Energy & Geosciences Institute and sponsored by the DOE that tests EGS. According to the University of Utah, the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) drilled the first of two 11,000-ft wells in March 2021. Emphasis will be placed on improved drilling techniques and bit designs, isolation tools, stimulating fractures from cased wells, fracture imaging technologies, managing induced seismicity, and reservoir characterization.

Dabbar discussed ConocoPhillips’ ESG efforts and plans to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. He described the company’s “triple mandate,” which includes “meeting the transition pathway demand,” delivering competitive returns to shareholders and achieving net-zero emissions during the energy transition. 

“What we see is the transition demand is low cost of supply, low GHG (greenhouse-gas emissions), and top tier environmental, social and governance performance,” Dabbar said. “How do we do that? Well, a big part of it in our business is capital allocations—which well gets the capital. And a big part of that is directing [capital] to the lowest cost of supply resources. And that’s where the application technology that many of you in this room have developed and put out in the field, that’s what really helps us drive the low cost of supply. Yes, we’ll have that important role in the energy mix, but it should be met by low cost of supply and low GHG intensity production.”

To achieve its goals, Dabbar said, ConocoPhillips is applying technologies designed with minimal emissions.

“And how do we find technology to bolt onto existing assets that will reduce their emissions on brownfield level?” he said. “Vapor recovery, recovering waste gas, we would like to sell natural gas. The methane reduction, which is both changes to the existing equipment and future modification, [and] electrification. And this is a place where both on the [drilling and completion] area where we started to work with e-frac fleet, then operational efficiencies where we really focus on how to minimize the energy consumption in our operation.”

One of the major players in e-frac technology is Halliburton, which, as Segura explained, initiated development of electric-powered frac fleets in 2016.

Segura highlighted the benefits of e-frac, which include fuel savings and emissions reductions of up to 50%.

“So that is a pretty remarkable impact on emissions profile of our industry, and it is certainly worth aspiring to,” he said. “Now, the point I'll make here is aspiring is not enough. The desire, the thought, the concept, the prototypes—those are all sufficient. Our industry works every day on real workout in the field. And our industry will not go backwards on things that are driven around efficiencies and cost-effectiveness. The way our industry really adopts new technology is with superior performing solutions to direct better economics.”

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